A Hefty Bag Filled with Helium Balloons
by Rhyolight04
Summary: Takes place immediately after Put My Heart in a Jar, etc. I promised fluff, trying to be an angst-free zone. K for now. Not my characters, they are Marlowe's, but if he hurts them anymore he should lose custody.
1. Chapter 1

They stood like that that for minutes? hours? finally safe in each others' arms, in a new weird still moment, where that was so much more than enough that Rick could hardly move. Kate was nestled against his chest as though they had been made to fit together, and for a wonder, neither of them was crying. _The evening is looking up._

"I said that this morning, I wanted you, and tomorrow I probably will again and I'll need to you to tell me to slow down," Rick said. It was still weird, not wanting to tear off her clothes.

"What if I don't want you to?"

_I'll think you don't have the sense God gave a golfball. _"I'm so used to your needing time I wouldn't know what to answer," Rick said. _Oh, that was sensitive all right._ "Honestly? I like change, we needed change; if this is how we are now, compared with how we were this afternoon, it was worth all of it. It cost a lot. So, can we see for a little while — days, not years — how we are? Like, did you really say you would stop working your mother's case, until further notice and discussion? Which I am willing to have if we get more information… but for now, I can, for real, look your father in the eye? and also not feel cold sweat when I think of you?"

He held her in his arms and thought he could feel her thinking. "Yeah," she agreed. "But-cold sweat? Really?"

"Hot sweat as well, of course, but that's a good feeling. Kate, I've been so damn terrified for you. Your life — any cop, any New Yorker's, anybody's life is balanced on so many knife-edges already, yet I actually allow my daughter to leave our house every day. I know how things happen to people, that the last time they have together can be any time at all. But snipers? Paramilitary extractions of people who want to kill you from courtrooms? I have some idea how you could sanely have a duty to your mother, and to the others, because—" _because you are the most beautiful of the angels of vengeance, ooh, I want to write that sometime, but she told me to cut out the archetypes— _"Because that's part of your desire for justice. But the rest of us, who are alive, we want some of you too. Cold sweat. Yes."

Kate took her head off Rick's shoulder look enough to look at him. He looked back. "I wish I had a better way with words," she said.

"It's a living, but it hasn't always got me where I wanted to go."

"And then you say things like that and I'm not intimidated anymore."

"A jackass is a wonderful thing to have around, see? I just mean, ah, Kate—" he crushed her suddenly to him for a moment. "The— that you heard me say 'I love you,' that you seem to like it, is key, is everything to me, is important; but I haven't been part of your life as long as your mother, alive or dead. Or even for the length of time you've been working her case. This is big, Kate. I don't want to glib through it. This is about the whole way you live. If you end up pursuing it again, I want that to be a choice—" _and one I am involved in helping you make _"— and it's really important for you to own it. For the choice— not to because you're getting bullied by people who love you, or bullies inside you telling to act like a—" he swallowed some poorly-selected words. "That you're acting freely and not because you put yourself in some archetype. I'm not the only one here who wants to act like a good story."

"My mom will always be part of me…" Kate began to feel her way. "The way she died, and the way I've mourned her will always be part of me. And I do want what we all say— like you say, we say it glibly: I do want 'closure,' a clean case with all the ends tied-up. But I have done all I can. For now. And Roy chose to die and leave me a chance to live, if I'm willing to admit not everything gets a tidy ending. Which I should know, I have cold cases and they bother me sometimes but I can put them away." She stood a little free of him, proud and tall. "And sometimes I have to do that. And it's not a cop-out."

"It very much is not."_And anytime you want some excuses, Kate, I got a thousand, but I'm shutting up right now._

"So yes, I really mean it: I can stop prying. I can take the board in my living room down."

Rick felt something roll off of him. "One hell of a metaphor, Beckett."

"What?"

"Yeah. Walls? Down?"

"Oh. Hmm. Might be…" She was shocked. "Do people really work like that?"

"Life imitating art? Yes. It is incredibly satisfying. And you can use my secure smartboard any time you want."

"Middle of the night?" There was a purr in Kate's voice of pure evil.

"You're very supportive when I start to babble with relief."

"It does relieve some of the pressure." She giggled. "Poor Dr. Kovalic will be so happy!"

_And maybe you will, too, Kate, I haven't heard you laugh in a while. _"How will you tell him?"

"I'm supposed to be keeping some kind of journal. Like what you said, about paying attention to what happens, how I feel about what happens."

"So you can mail him a file?"

"No, he wanted me to use a pen and paper."

"So, let me guess — a partly-used spiral notebook from either your training days or college, with the pages you used at that time torn out. The spiral is half-squashed and the cover is in the process of detaching." He glanced down at her face. "I'm right, aren't I?"

"You looked in my bag?"

"No. Making an educated guess about how you drag your feet. It's either black or green and has a telephone number written on the shiny part."

"Dark green, and it's a website."

"I forgot, times have changed. In a few minutes, you're going to take me home and I'm going to fix your pissy self-image and your complete lack of respect for anyone in therapy."

"Oooooooooooooh, harsh."

"Right now I want to hold you longer. Okay?"

"Okay. I think, Rick? Very much okay."

He wanted to kiss her, tangle his lips in Kate's hair, but the sense of peace after a terrible day was too great to mess with. _And I am tired in places I didn't know I could feel tired._ So he kept his hands in acceptably formal places until she stirred. "So, if you really did mean to tell me you love me, we can have this again?" she asked.

"Yes. So, if you really didn't mind hearing that I love you, I can hold you without anyone dying, or nearly dying?"

"Yes. Can we mention that I said something about loving you, in return?"

"You were under pressure. The heat of the moment. Maybe you thought I was dying." _I was dying. _"Another thing I would like to talk about after the dust has settled."

"I meant it."

"I know." Rick brought her hand to his lips. "I know. Give me a little time?"

"I guess," Kate said. "I owe you as much time as you gave me."

Rick hated to leave her even slightly at sea but he was empty. "Not that much time. Please. I want … I want to be able to accept your heart, not just say, 'Great, thanks, me too.' Let me have time so I can recognize, I guess; cherish, enfold, celebrate, really feel what that means to you. My head is too full of synonyms and my heart is still too relieved. All right?"_ And if I had to tell you I don't think you're able to know your own heart right now…that would not go over well. If you hadn't had your own walls, you would have noticed mine. _Rick watched her face and it seemed she was all right with that. He kissed her fingers again. "Now, will you take me home, so we can talk stationery supplies porn?"


	2. Chapter 2

Kate drove quickly, quietly, to Castle's building. She rarely felt the ten years' age difference between them — there was no question which of them was more mature, right? Now she thought she could see what he would look like when he was 70. _And it is still damn good. But how long has he looked so…barren? So hopeless? I did this to him? _The heat she was used to feeling between them was banked, somehow — at least the circuit that rose in her wasn't completing itself in his eyes the way it had—till when? But she had never been so aware of his tenderness, either. Kate took one hand off the steering wheel and touched his. He squeezed back and the smile she could see as she tried to pay attention to the road was brief but real.

There was a _legal_ parking place on Broome Street, and she pulled into it with amazement. "I should just leave the car here and walk home."

"Not at this time of night," Rick growled. "Besides, you have a spot at home, right?"

"Rent on it went up again, too." Kate was very conscious of his closeness next to her. They waved to the doorman and took the elevator up. Rick unlocked his door and stood aside to let her go in first; there was a night light on the little table. He took her coat and she leaned back against him for a moment, until Rick changed them to another feather-gentle embrace. Kate didn't feel any hints to turn it to a kiss, but his acceptance? his deep enfolding? cherishing? his need to have her in his arms? _among his synonyms_ gave her no disappointment. Again, tenderness: for her, from her to him. That night had been just as awful as he'd said. "So good to hold you, Rick."

His words were muffled in her hair. "Kate. SO good."

Kate felt his exhaustion through his shoulders, through the pressure on her shoulders. "I'm so sorry I put you through… all this."

"Where would we start, if we apologized for every missed signal? I'd never thought just getting to this would be so hard on either of us." He hugged a little closer as he said 'to this.' "But don't —, I mean, I won't let go easily now, either."

"I won't let you go."

They did leave that particular touch, eventually. "Hungry? Thirsty?" Rick asked, keeping his voice low. Kate shook her head and they went into his study, closing the door. She went straight to his darkened smartboard. He sighed and turned it on, waking up his computer and finding the 'murder board' file he had made.

"It looks like you told me everything you have here," Kate said. She wondered, as she enjoyed the technology, playing a little bit, if she really could leave the case alone. _It feels like yes. It feels like YES. It's all right to leave it. Staying alive is not being defeated. _

"Of course I did," Rick said, rummaging in a box. "How dumb do you — oh, just don't answer." He stopped and looked her. "Beckett?"

"She's starting to look young, that's all. I was born when she was 25. This picture was taken a year or two before she died."

"So, 44… too young to have a daughter your age," Rick said. He slipped an arm around her waist. Kate snuggled. "And just the right age to have someone a little older than Alexis. Looks younger every day, from where I stand."

"You have a couple years to go—"

""It's not the years, it's the mileage.' …Are you okay?"

'_When people ask you that, Kate, it means they want to know how you are. How you feel,'_ her therapist's words came back. _Nowhere safer than this, ever._ "I think I am. I'm —I'm trying out what it's like to think of this" she waved at the smartboard "as a cold case." She looked at her mother, at Roy Montgomery— he'd look young to her, some day, at the faces of killers and victims. She heard Rick's sharp intake of breath. "What?"

"Crap. Stupid writer thoughts. Poem I read."

"Give?"

"Just once today, Beckett, I want not to cry. Can we save it for later? I promise." Kate looked at her writer. _If I'm his muse, he's MY writer. _The months or years not allowing Richard Castle, the scandalous writer of racy prose, to touch her, despite his tastiness; now the hour of finding a quietness in him he seemed to be able to share. She nodded.

"Come and look at this." He had put three flat glass-topped boxes on his desk.

"What have you got?"

"Pick a pen. From this one, or this one."

"Are they cigar boxes?"

"They're collector's boxes for fountain pens. You know. The kind that use ink? That make your writing look better, not worse, that suggest what you write is unique and valuable, instead of mass-produced and disposable?"

"Not really," Kate said. The pens lay in slightly velvety slots, blotches of blue or black or a brown like dried blood in this one. All colors of shiny plastic and bright metal; she guessed they were a range of costs and qualities, too. The second box had only half its slots filled, was cleaner. the third was smaller, containing only three pens and slots for two more. Two of the pens looked like works of art, scrolls and swirls of gold or silver in Art Deco; one was a dull scratched black celluloid. "These are the collector's items?"

"The ones I probably shouldn't have bought, anyway. But they were so beautiful, and they do write very well. I use them sometimes but I'm not comfortable with platinum."

"And that one?" Kate pointed to the ugly duckling.

"That one has a credible provenance to Raymond Chandler."

"No Poe?"

"He only had dip pens." Rick picked up the middle box. "Here's the one I wrote my first two books with." He uncapped the scratched brown plastic. "Perfectly good cheap Parker and see the nib?"

"It looks worn?"

"First pen I ever wore out," he said with great satisfaction. "This box is mostly some pretty things, but I don't use them much.

"And the third?" Kate asked. "Ink stains?"

"The ones I use. I like to change colors sometimes. Come on, choose one."

"I'll lose it —"

"I promise these are just pens normal people would buy."

"Normal people buy fountain pens?"

"You'd be surprised." He watched her as Kate's hands hovered about the pens. There was a smooth aluminum one, a bit larger, looking like it was made for a trendy engineer. A rocket-designer. No swirls. "Oh, good, the Lamy. Yeah, try that one."

Rick indicated a pad of paper. Kate hesitated, uncapped it, and wrote _Meet me under the clock at Grand Central Station._ Her handwriting, which she usually despised, looked more like, well — herself. "Hmm." She wrote _Katherine Constantia Beckett._

"Your middle name is Constantia?"

"My mother's grandmother. She came over from somewhere in Middle Europe and I doubt that she spelled it that way. My mother loved her. She died in 1963. My mom said I look like her." She smiled at Rick. "More layers."

"Try a couple of the other pens." She did. There were others she liked, including a little orange one from the next box up, but it looked too much like a jewel and she put it aside.

"If I have to take one, I would like the —Lamy? Why are you smiling?"

"That's the one I used to write _Heat Wave_. Nikki wants you to have it." The look on his face was closer to the happy, trouble-causing Castle than Kate had seen in awhile, and though she rolled her eyes, Kate also felt herself blushing. "Including page 105, yes." Rick's eyes definitely danced. "Come on, look at notebooks."

It was one of those printer-paper-boxes, only it seemed to be half-full of notebooks. Or books? Some of them had cloth or leather spines. "Castle, you have a Problem."

"I know. I feel at home in office-supply stores. I like to visit them when I'm on the road. And it's not that I don't travel with a notebook, it's things like getting stuck somewhere and separated from my luggage, or… anyway, it's cheaper than most of my other bad habits. An empty notebook is such pure potential. If I can find the perfect notebook I can write the Great American Novel."

Kate finally unpacked the box and laid the contents out. "Considering how severe you were to me, you have a lot of spiral-bound ones."

"I don't mind spiral-bound, I just knew yours would be beaten-up but too useable to throw away. There are times and places for thrift —"

"Strange to hear that from you—"

"But for a journal, something you're supposed to be using to help yourself out of a hard place — you need to show respect. It's not right to put your heart's blood in something you've stomped on and torn pages out of."

Kate felt this was getting a little too close to truth for comfort. "What do you use?"

"I thought you knew me. I am MUCH too pretentious to carry anything other than a Moleskine. And I think they're kind of narrow for spilling your guts, if you're not in practice." He showed her a shelf near his desk, crowded with battered Moleskines. Years and years of brown covers, a few other colors. "First drafts of first-drafts, appointments, shopping lists, phone numbers and addresses, business cards. I use my phone for a lot of that now, of course. But I like having the old ones to look at, so once in a while I print out all that and stick it in one of these. A good backup." He pulled one of the older ones off the shelf and opened it. "Alexis on her first day of kindergarten. Business card from the place we used to stop and get breakfast."

"Almost a scrapbook?"

"If you find me buying die-cut balloons to paste in—"

"Don't worry, I'll shoot you."

"Thanks. Don't forget that." He riffled through. "Floor plan of Derek Storm's apartment." In pencil, heavily annotated.

"Wow, and each piece of furniture?"

"I wanted to know what got broken when someone attacked him. I like being able to really look, sometimes. I mean, now there's all kinds of stuff on the Web — Jenny Crusie has a Pinterest board for her characters, and I can see how that would help, sometimes. Though I draw the line at collage."

Whatever had been going through Kate's head, the collision of two of her favorite writers knocked it aside. "You read Jennifer Crusie?"

"What's not to like about Jennifer Crusie? She knows more about the way stories work than I ever will. The heroine always gets a dog, a house, and a really decent guy, if not in that order. My mother and Alexis and I pass them back and forth." Rick looked are her, reading her expression. "And yes, the sex scenes are excellent. You look stunned."

"I think it's that you both know she's reading them. It's never been like that with my dad. Although… he does read Nikki Heat." They both winced.

"I'm still alive," Rick said. "At least he understands the difference between fiction and… anyway. So, Jenny Crusie — I'd rather my daughter learned about relationships from _Crazy for You_ than from _Twilight._"

Kate shook her head. "So many layers to the Castle onion."

"Damn right." He smiled. "You know how you're supposed to remember the good times?" Kate nodded. "One of the best, not long before Gina left: Alexis was about eleven. Gina found her reading my _Dykes to Watch Out For _collection. I though she was going to sic Child Protective Services on me. Of course Alexis pointed out she'd read them before….It didn't really help when Alexis said they explained a lot of stuff no one seemed to want to tell her about. Oh, the yelling. Good times."

"Somehow that part of your life hasn't come out in your books." She tried, and failed, to imagine Derek Storm as a father. Nor Nikki a mother, either.

"It's not all fun and games, murders and betrayals, shootouts and decapitations — life has many facets too horrible to inflict on my readers. I write escapism, remember."

"But do you do the, the 'smelling the roses and writing down the thorns' thing you were colluding with my therapist about?"

"Sometimes," said Rick, becoming serious again. "One thing I learned before I finished my first book— whether I 'write what I know' or make something up, I'm writing out of myself. There I am, writing some entirely made-up impersonal plot, and it twists in my mind so I see it from a different angle and I realize 'Wow, is _that_ how I feel about that? _That _was what was going on?' I try to work from an outline but every so often the scene just takes off somewhere amazing and I have to go there, even though it may not stay in the final product, So, no, I don't keep a journal the way your therapist wishes you would, not regularly. But yes, one way and another. I'm strongly in favor of anyone writing anything. I have people living in my head who want out, and they're all parts of me." He looked anxious. "Does that sound crazy?"

_And which of us is seeing a shrink? Who has the symptoms? _"Most of the time you're very high-functioning," she assured him. "And your readers? We need the eggs."

Rick apparently recognized the joke. "I can live with that."

Kate looked back at his desk. "So you have the notebooks you buy when you're homesick, and the ones that look like you're trying to find something that isn't a Moleskine, and what are the rest?"

Rick picked up a lovely hard-covered book with tooled leather covers. "Oh, art, I suppose. Or craft. Just nice things. This was a gift from someone at a con— a convention?"

"I know, been to some—"

"—Someone who made it. It really is too nice to use. I thought I would give it to Alexis when she gets married or something. I have a couple like this I write in sometimes, not routine things."

It was on the tip of Kate's tongue to ask _What? Poetry? _But Castle wasn't showing any signs of wanting to share. Which was a different side than he usually showed. "You said the Moleskines were the wrong size for spilling my guts; what do you advise, then?"

"Well, something between A-4 and A-5, really, a little smaller than typing paper? You want lined or unlined?"

"Lined."

"Why did I even ask? How about one of those?" He pointed. Kate picked up a clean-looking eight by eight inch spiral-bound notebook, with slightly-textured black plastic covers and a red elastic band to mark a place or keep it closed.

"How about this one?"

"Excellent choice, Madame. College-ruled, from Staples, Minneapolis, 2009, I think. Do you need me to scribble on the first page because to break the curse?"

"I think I'll be all right." Kate was ready to be finished but Castle still looked thoughtful.

"That will do just fine, but I wish… take one of the nice ones, please Kate? Keep it at home. Write things sometimes when you don't feel you have to."

"Okay." Kate looked at the 'nice ones' and picked up one about the size of a trade paperback. The hard covers were flowered (fancy wrapping paper?), with an off-white linen spine. The pages were creamy, unlined, not too thin. "This have a story?"

"It was in the 'seconds' bin at a craft show a couple years ago. Artist mostly a photographer, but she tried making books. This one, she said she wasn't pleased with the way the endpapers went in. Can you see any problem?"

"Maybe off by about three degrees? But is that the front or the back?"

"You decide."

"I think I'll let you scribble on a page. You decide… And, Castle?" Rick stopped before he uncapped his pen (another Lamy, she thought, only red) and looked inquiry at her. Kate squirmed. "You have them right here... Could you print off the pictures of my mom, and Roy? Small enough so I can tape them in… I like the idea. Am I being weird?"

"Do you really want me to answer that?" Rick awakened the printer, clicked on the files.

"Yeah." She felt obscurely hurt.

Rick came and put his arms around her again. "I think even Martha Stewart would find it okay to have pictures of people you love and miss in your diary. Harmless. Sensitive in all the right ways. Psychologically sound to a degree you would find suspicious. And- compared to having the murder board in your living room?"

She thought of it as more in the study, but he had a point. "When you put it that way."

"And more private, if that's a factor." He untwined them, gently. "Let me get you some ink, too."

When Kate got home her apartment seemed different. Or maybe she was what was different. Twenty hours earlier she had been angry at the bomber, puzzled a little by Castle but not aware of really thinking of him that much, and, to guess from the way she felt now, racked by guilt and warped by tension. The way she felt now might be exhaustion — for sure— or the release of something she had been carrying for weeks. Months. Years. She was still a little buzzed and knew it wasn't quite time to sleep. _Might as well do that now._

Taking down the pictures, the notes. Putting them into one manila folder. Putting the folder into her desk drawer, far at the back. No vengeful Furies came and told her what a bad daughter she was. Kate took down the board, freeing up…a window. Something you look through, rather than at. Her mother's case really had been a wall. Kate shook her head at the solidity of the metaphor, wiped the now-revealed glass with window cleaner and thought about Castle. And, reluctantly, about herself.

She sat on the couch and opened the clean black notebook, put down the time and date from habit in clean flowing blue-black. It looked good, more assertive than ballpoint. _So tonight I took down my mother's murder board,_ she wrote. _It was a hell of a day. I'm lucky _false starts. She crossed them out. _ I'm lucky that Castle _long pause _ I'm lucky that Castle really loves me. I'm lucky he was hurt, and angry, and let me know. I'm lucky he let me start to apologize. I don't want to screw up again. _Long pause.

She microwaved some milk. _I'm lucky Roy Montgomery loved me. _She drank the milk, washed her face, brushed her teeth. Put the pen (Castle said if it leaked he would buy her new everything, but he also said Lamy pens had supernatural powers of not leaking and of writing after months of disuse) and the notebook in her bag (the battered former notebook, which had almost nothing written in it, she put in with the recycling).

She put the small bag of ink cartridges in her desk (upon inspection they were more of the blue-black, rose_ in color and SCENT, honestly Castle, _ and something brown called Tabac) and took the other little book to her bedroom. Changed into an old flannel shirt that came down to her knees, got under the blankets. The small orange pen had somehow attached itself to the spine of the second journal. _Fine, Castle, you win. _She would have to ask what its story was. None of her office supplies had much history, before these.

The first page read, in very neat print unlike his usual handwriting: _This Book Belongs to Katherine Constantia Beckett, given with love and respect and hope by RAC, _ and the date. She had expected something more like the way he signed his own books. _Oh. This is about me, not him_. _Places for the people in my head to get out._ A thought flickered past that she might want a picture of him stuck to that page, regardless of his tact._  
_

The next pages held, carefully taped, prints of the two studio photos from the murder board, of her mother and her old captain. _Maybe some snapshots, when I come across them. _ She knew there were some phone pics of Roy from poker nights, basketball games. She had some of her mother on her hard drive. Kate turned the page, and found some more of Rick's clearest handwriting.

_They went with songs to the battle, they were young,_

_Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. _

_They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; _

_They fell with their faces to the foe._

_They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: _

_Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn._

_At the going down of the sun and in the morning_

_We will remember them._

_ -Laurence Binyon, "The Fallen," 1914_

When she could, she blew her nose, and fetched her bag and took out the notebook for her therapist, and added one sentence. _I am lucky to be alive._

* * *

You can find the rest of the poem Rick gave to Kate at h tee tee pee colon slash slash firstworldwar dot com slash poetsandprose slash binyon dot htm


	3. Chapter 3

_**A/N Now with editing, so most of the sentences should make sense. **_

_A couple of days after the bomb went off :_

Lanie Parish did not work with her back to the door. It was bad enough being in the basement, without any real offices nearby. She also thought she had seen more than enough zombie flicks lately. But paying attention to footsteps in the darkened hallway was simple enough. She had oiled half the creak out of the hinges, so they made a sensible squeak rather than 'Ye Olde Haunted House' when Castle walked in. "You only look a little like the walking dead," she told him, coming out from behind her desk.

"I was in a hurry, so I haven't shaved. Is it that bad?"

"I think it's because I know the back story. Come here." To Rick's pleased surprise, she hugged him. "You've had a lousy couple of days. Sit down." He took the chair next to her desk. She closed the disturbing picture of someone's kidneys on her computer screen.

"Who talked?" he asked.

"Who hasn't? You scared hell out of Karpowski, she could hear you from outside the men's room while you were throwing up. She thought she'd have to get you an ambulance. She told me that after I had Kate in here, so it made some sense."

"Kate, before or after?" Lanie looked at him. He colored a little. "Before or after we, ah, cleared the air?"

"Both. First she came down and figured out what the hell was the matter with you, because of course you couldn't tell her- oh, never mind. Then, yesterday she came and said she had been being an idiot and had lied to your face for the better part of a year because she thought you couldn't possibly mean it when you said you loved her, since people always lie when you're bleeding and they think you're going to to die. I thought she'd seen better movies than that. I didn't kill her, because she was so happy I hardly recognized her. And then she tells me you had come clean about the Evil Not-Dead still being a threat, and apparently that gave her permission — after I don't know how many people had suggested that maybe this was too hot to handle— to back off on her mother's case."

"My God," Castle said. Despite the circles under his eyes and the stubble he managed to look radiant for a minute. "She's actually talking about it?"

"Well, probably not to everybody. But to me, and I think that's what she's off to say to her father today. And seeing him usually involves more prep time spent being uncomfortable."

"She loves him."

"Not all parents and kids are as lucky as you and Alexis. Nor has Alexis been doing a job you basically dislike for the last few years and damn near got herself killed. So, after Kate the second time, yesterday, Alexis came in. You should be proud."

"I am always proud of Alexis."

"Your daughter doesn't give up information unless she's sure she'll get some in return. She felt me out very carefully before mentioning that you and Beckett showed up at your place at one in the morning and talked for an hour before my girl left and, whatever it was your mother had been bent out of shape about, she seems to be over it."

"It's like living with very well-intentioned paparazzi," Castle said. "I'm not going to bother asking what you told her, because it will have been true, reasonably kind, and not much more than necessary; you're the sanest person in Homicide. Which is why I've sneaked in to see you today. So… any details you don't already have?"

"I don't know," Lanie told him. "I do know she looks ten years younger, or maybe older, if you've seen her looking as sad and lost as I have. Either way, much improved. She says she's put her mother's case on hiatus. The first time she said that, a long time ago, she looked like she'd lost a battle. This time she looked like she won. She's like a kid out of school."

"I hope to God, yes."

"What did you say? How did you persuade her to put it aside? "

"Javi told you about Mr. Smith?"

"You didn't tell him not to. And I am so glad to hear that's all out on the table, too."

"Lanie, I'm sorry. I never meant to make anyone keep any secrets from Kate, " Castle told her, as seriously as he had ever spoken. "Maybe I didn't need to have any secrets from her myself, but this last year… Telling her I was afraid she'd get killed again? (Did I say 'killed again?') Meeting secret agents in a parking garage?"

Lanie had never heard parentheses used in normal conversation, but it was Castle, after all. "Beyond even your taste for weird?"

"It was. As for Kate putting her her mother's case aside… I think she was just ready. Do most people need that long to figure out if something's not worth being shot for?"

"You know she's not most people. Maybe she also realized she had something she didn't want to lose. And about time."

"That's a lot to put on me." Lanie looked at Castle. It made him squirm. "Okay, maybe. But I think something finally clicked about what Roy was saying the night he was killed."

"She's never talked much about that."

"There's a detail you need, then." Castle had thought about that night many times, keeping silent; now the words poured out of him, at his tale-spinning best, far more than details. All Lanie had heard about that night was a choked, half-muttered version from Esposito, in circumstances not ideal for recalling much later. Castle told her everything, with the benefit of hindsight: the late afternoon call Montgomery made to him; the text he and Kate had both received from Ryan and Esposito; the captain's last words with the detective he had trained, betrayed and chosen to die for. How Castle had taken Kate from the field of battle; how they had both heard Montgomery talking to Lockwood, and the gunshots. About the local police responding to the shots, and soon after that, about the way Kate began the cover-up of Montgomery's place in the long story. But she didn't need to conceal anything from them about what had just happened.

"She told them she and Montgomery had planned to meet someone who might know more about the Lockwood case." How Montgomery feared Beckett and Castle would spook the witness and how he had sent them away, just before Lockwood himself and some other gunmen had arrived. How she and Castle had heard the shots and come back to the hangar too late. "She kept as close to the truth as she could, and unless someone was bothered enough to trace the text and calls to her phone, it wasn't a story that was going to come undone very easily."

Lanie was not quite in tears, but she felt the pain in Castle's voice. "Javi told me, after they texted her and she didn't call back right away, they got worried. But she hadn't told anyone where she was going."

"I called them," Rick said. "While Kate was still kneeling over Roy's body. They came barrelling into the crime scene, through all the Jersey cops, and helped me get her out of there as soon as our statements were taken. Ryan drove her home; she wasn't — she didn't— I was pretty sure she didn't blame me for Roy's death, but she asked Ryan to drive her car. We'd been on the outs for a day or so already."

"You what?"

Castle backtracked a day. "Her dad saw the news about Raglan getting shot in front of us. He came to ask me to get her to back off. Montgomery asked me the same thing, actually. I didn't think there was much hope, but I tried. When I asked her to back off the case she blew up at me… which might have been because I was pushing too hard…"

"As I recall that week she was pretty close to the edge anyway."

Castle shrugged. "Too much, too soon after, to think about that. When we got to her apartment, it was no time for us to mend anything. We just fidured out what was safe to say about the captain's… involvement in the case. She was clear about not wanting me to stay and talk." He was silent again for minute. "I know I did the right thing, doing what he asked, getting Kate out of there— if he was right, that they would have gone for Beckett first. But what if we had just taken cover? Could we have saved him?"

It was nothing Lanie could answer. She handed him a can of seltzer from her mini-fridge. "I haven't been in many firefights," she told him. "Meaning, any; nor had to listen while someone fought and died. That's… I don't know. Maybe hearing that, I can understand why she needed so much time away. Not just her getting shot, herself. Damn you, Kate, the things you choose not to say." They pulled the tabs. "And she forgave him."

"Why I say 'extraordinary' about her." Castle was still moved, she could see. "I don't know if I could have said that. I don't know if I could have even thought it, and it wasn't my mother who was killed. "

"In my experience forgiveness is something like grief, or love; you have to keep doing it."

"I think she's doing grief now, maybe for the first time. And I think that's what pushed her over to being able to quit the case. Roy was very clear about why he was confronting Lockwood. Stupid word. He so damn nearly made it."

Lanie wondered when Castle had taken time to count what that night had cost him. "If Roy's death lets Kate put down this burden… at least it wasn't all wasted."

"And he took one very bad man down with him." There was ice in Castle's voice. After what Lockwood had done to Kevin and Javi, Lanie agreed.

"You're not going to take this investigation up now, are you?"

"More than I have? No. I promised I'd tell her anything I found out, and I don't want her picking it up again. Screw justice. I want Kate Beckett." The hardness in him softened again. "Which is why she's the angel and I'm just a writer. But she may let me try to look after her, now. Only…" Castle rubbed at his face. "I know where your loyalties lie, and that's why I'm talking to you, but if you see any advice you can give me, I hope you will."

"You want to gossip about Kate."

"I could quibble about your choice of words; actually I just want some…I think I want your permission. I want to know if she's in any shape … do you think? What I mean is, may I have your permission to court your best friend?"

"What you mean is," Lanie said, trying, too, to figure it out, "is whether she's in any state for you to court her."

"That's it, but also…."

"You're not sure about what?"

"About either of us. She's sort of in rebound mode for all the time she was, not to sound melodramatic —"

"You love that stuff—"

"Haunted by, maybe possessed? by her mother's case. And I, I am burned toast right now. I have emotional whiplash. For what, eight months? I wait for her to tell me it's okay that I love her. Now it's a subject I'm not hurrying to open. I yelled at her for telling me she was scared, and now I'm second-guessing everything. I felt like she had chopped my chest open the other day." He stopped and a ghost of the loss of his faith in Beckett crept over his face again. "And I was more angry and hurt than I can ever remember being before, ever."

"You built a big piece of your world on her, a lot longer than any eight months."

He looked surprised that anyone had noticed. Lanie resisted the urge for a dope-slap. "Kate noticed, too, Castle. If she hadn't liked it, you'd have been sent home long ago. What were you going to say?"

"Okay, so it has been a long time. And then the other day I thought she'd destroyed everything I thought was true about her. And she actually did give me some pretty accurate remarks about not being a character in a story or a Goddess Archetype —"

"Only the two of you would ever fight about that—"

"I think she was right; what?"

"Never mind—"

"It can't have been more than a few hours between hearing her tell that witness she remembered everything from the time she was shot, and the time we talked things out, but …it was long enough to leave me feeling really burned." He shook his head. "I don't feel like everything is over or everything I loved in her was a lie, like I did; but I'm not quite able to relax and think it's nothing but good times ahead."

"That might be because you have brains, probably more than I would have given you credit for — oh, hush. Last year you had a fight with her, the next day Montgomery gets killed, then she gets shot…gives all of us the Greta Garbo treatment for three months, comes back and everything is supposed to be fine. Except she won't discuss any of it, even when you and Javi talk her down from a PTSD episode. Then there's a bomb in the city and she takes some feelings of yours that have been trying to mind their own business- however dumb that might have been— and she stomps on them. Then you have another, major, air-clearing fight. And you wonder why you feel like burned toast. I'm not putting either of you down if I say you're entitled to your own version of PTSD."

"My head knows I still love her, and I think I know in my guts, but part of maybe my heart — it's like if I reach for her I KNOW it's going to hurt."

"Castle. I wasn't kidding. You have collateral damage from her getting shot. You said you had whiplash. Don't feel bad about needing time, yourself."

"Thank you," Castle said. " And it's not just me I'm concerned about. The real Kate is more than anything I added onto her. It's just— right now when she's made this dramatic u-turn—For now… I don't want her to think I don't want to be with her… I don't think she _doesn't_ want to be with me," Castle said. "I just want her in her right mind, is all. I want this to last."

"Is that what you're afraid of?"

"Being a three time loser would be bad enough, but losing Beckett would be…" Castle closed his eyes. "I had a taste of that. I don't want to live there."

"I have to say, I enjoyed how light-hearted she was yesterday."

"I feel like she wants to rush off into the sunset right away. Where the sunset equals 'not farther than maybe Buffalo,' I don't mean she wants to leave the police or anything —"

Lanie cut to the chase. "Are you going to ask her to marry you?"

Castle had the grace not to look too surprised. "Can I give you a couple answers there? Yes. Probably. I hope so. Eventually. After I figure out if she'd like that or if I'd never see her again."

"You _are _paying attention. If you think she's scared of the L-word, just even show her a ring and you'll need a radio collar. But you know, there's another part of her that wants to have little Castle babies." She watched Castle blush so so deep it must have been painful. "As a physician I'd rather that was sooner than later."

"Thank you for saying more than I really wanted to hear."

"You ask me, you get what you get. Someone has to be practical. You know how much I love Kate, Castle. She's not stupid, she definitely has hormones and eyes and common sense. But show her something her really wants and —"

"She'll give you a list of reasons why she can't have it? I noticed. That's what feels a little off. In one evening she quits her mother's case and is ready to admit I love her." Lanie gave him a look. "Okay, and even to say she loves me."

"You really are not in all that much better shape than she is, are you?"

"Maybe not. I really don't want to screw this up. You can tell, I'm even asking for advice." Rick Castle in pain. It was not something Lanie liked to see. "Maybe you could give both of us some heavy drugs."

"Don't think it hasn't crossed my mind. Okay— not to flatter either of us, but we are her best friends, right?"

"You are, yeah— I'm never sure if she knows I'm on her side."

"I'll come back to that, some time," Lanie assured him. "But she kept your—" she hesitated.

" 'Declaration?' "

"— That'll do nicely—to herself like it was a trauma. She wasn't making fun of you behind your back."

"I have to admit, I wondered. She did say she'd discussed it with her therapist."

"I know him," Lanie said. "He's a really nice guy. Not stupid, which, when I heard she was seeing him professionally, gave me hope. But if he's the only one she spoke to about it…"

"Like a trauma," Castle said slowly. "Like something that happened that was too big to handle."

"Like something that happened _to her _the same week her mother's case blew up again, and she had a fight with you, and Roy died, and on the same day that she was shot, and the same day she knew for sure Roy had not killed off all the remnants of that bunch of murderous -" she searched for a word again.

"I'm not sensitive about 'bastard—' "

"I was going to say something worse but I wanted to avoid alliteration." Her concern for _le mot juste_ lifted Castle's heart far enough to show on his face. She was glad to see him look cheerful even for a moment. "Maybe it was all one package, and both of you can finally begin to unwrap now."

"I hope so." The sigh he gave came from his shoes, from his bones.

"Is anybody looking after you, Castle?" Lanie asked. "You don't have a therapist?"

"I haven't needed one lately, although I'm beginning to wonder."

"You have friends?"

"Does anyone have enough friends? Friends to dump things like this on? I have Nikki and Rook to torture. My mother actually looks after me as much as she can. Somewhat of a change from forty years ago, but not unwelcome. I'm talking with you because you're out of Kate's chain of command; I wouldn't do that to Espo or Ryan. I could have talked to Roy; hell, I did talk to him, but he was more protective than you are."

"I'm protective of Kate!" _And, hon, you have no idea how much I've been sticking up for you._

"Yeah, but you don't seem to think I'll use her and cast her aside. He worried."

"Before last spring, if you'd hurt her, I wouldn't have had time to kill you, because she would have strangled you herself. Well, I hope. She never even keyed Sorenson's car."

"I suppose it's too late for me to do it?" Rick looked briefly hopeful.

"It is. By some years. And it's not your car to key." Lanie looked at him. "You're not having anxiety attacks, writer's block, nightmares?"

"Not… many. More right after she was shot, but it's better. The other stuff, no."

"Not drinking too much, not playing in traffic?"

"If we hadn't had the major air-clearing fight, I dunno. I was ready to stomp off into the sunset myself and find a blonde; thank GOD Beckett found me first. But no symptoms now, except I'm exhausted."

"Loving Kate, the way you have, has been a long, quiet stress. Your own kind of haunting. But it was familiar. It's going to be different."

"I told her we had needed to change, and that where we are now was worth all it had cost to get there."

"Well, that was sweet, but it doesn't make it less frightening. I think you'll feel better soon, and I hope— I so want to think Kate will be somewhere near where she's meant to be soon. If you can just be kind to each other for a little while, then soon I think she'll be sane enough to court, as you put it."

"That would be nice." Lanie watched Castle do the thousand-mile stare.

"So, what are you going to do?" she asked.

"Wait and see a few days. Hope we catch a case that doesn't push too many buttons and see how she is."

"And see how you are. Try to be kind to yourself, like you would if you were writing about someone in your position."

"I don't write that kind of book. All of them, Nikki, Rook, my God, _Derek,_ are hard-boiled. No one gets traumatized, not by love, not by death. But I also got told she's not that kind of character. So I'll try to keep that in mind." Castle rose, and held out both his hands to Lanie. She squeezed back.

"Next to seeing her happy, you know, I'd like to see you happy, yourself."

"Don't crack the egg of my being hard-boiled," he told her. "But you'll be the third to know about either of us. Thank you so much."

"You're welcome, Castle. Go take a nap."


End file.
